This paper shows that historical missionary activity has had a persistent effect on schooling outcomes, and contributed to a reversal of fortunes wherein historically richer ethnic groups are poorer today. Combining contemporary individual-level data with a newly constructed dataset on mission...

Using cross-country data for about 70 countries and regional data for about 180 African provinces, we show that competition between Protestant and Catholic missionaries increased schooling in former colonies. Our evidence implies that Protestant missionaries increased schooling in Catholic...

This paper studies the longevity of historical legacies in the context of the formation of human capital. The Partitions of Poland (1772-1918) represent a natural experiment that instilled Poland with three different legacies of education, resulting in sharp differences in human capital among...

We examine several hypotheses regarding the determinants and implications of political protest, motivated by the wave of popular uprisings in Arab countries starting in late 2010. We draw attention to one of the most fundamental correlates of political activity identied in the literature, namely...

The official national accounts statistics do not show the role of human capital in the national economy. A set of satellite tables supplementing the standard national accounts statistics could serve this data need. In this satellite account, expenditure on education and training are recorded as...

Barro and Lee (1994), in an influential empirical study of the determinants of economic growth, find that, whereas growth is positively related to male schooling, it is negatively related to female schooling. Stokey (1994) has suggested that this is largely due to the influence of four Asian...

We investigate how the link between individual schooling and political participation is affected by country characteristics. We introduce a focus on a set of variables-namely factor endowments-which in uence the relative productivity of human capital in political versus production activities....

Many empirical works suggest that education has a positive effect on earnings not only because it raises human capital but also because it functions as a signal when employers have incomplete information on employees' skills. The signaling role could have important consequences on the dynamics...

We provide evidence that economic circumstances are a key intermediating variable for understanding the relationship between schooling and political protest. Using the World Values Survey, we find that individuals with higher levels of schooling, but whose income outcomes fall short of that...